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Creating an Anthem for a Borough

John Forté, left, writer of the Nets’ anthem, and the team’s music supervisor, J. Period.Credit
Jason Szenes for The New York Times

On Tuesday night, when the Nets take on the Knicks for the second time this season at Barclays Center, a good chunk of the capacity crowd will be looking to let loose with its newly established chant of “Broooo-klyn! Broooo-klyn!” It will be loud — unless the Nets are being drastically outplayed — it will be impressive and it will be just as John Forté envisioned it would be.

Forté is the Brooklyn musician — Grammy-nominated for his work with the Fugees — who was asked by the Nets to create a song that could serve as an anthem for the team’s rebirth. He took on the assignment, knowing that the finished product would have some appropriate attitude and, for sure, a Brooklyn chant. And it does, with stretched-out evocations of the borough’s name serving as the concluding rallying cry for the hip-hop verses.

“I have the fondest memories of being a kid and no matter where I went, to whatever club, there was always that moment where the D.J. would ask if Brooklyn was in the house,” Forté said. “Invariably, Brooklyn is represented all around the world, and that was the chant that I heard when I was growing up.”

A portion of Forté’s song — titled “Brooklyn: Something to Lean On” — is played before every game as part of the Nets’ elaborate player introductions, which are an N.B.A. version of controlled chaos. A video of the players arriving at the arena, immaculately dressed, is displayed on the video board; the Brooklynettes, clad in leather, dance on the edges of the court; and BrooklyKnight, the team’s comic book mascot, waves a giant Nets flag.

"It speaks to who we are in Brooklyn," said Petra Pope, the Nets senior vice president who commissioned the song from Forté and is extremely proud of the result. “We’re in one of the coolest boroughs, and it had this great vibe while still making youwant to cheer and chant, so it encompassed everything we were looking for.”

Photo

Jay-Z cheering on the Nets at Barclays Center, where a large team flag is waved before games, and the team anthem is played.Credit
Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

Forté said: “The way that I approached it, I wanted this to be the kind of song where the players would listen to this on their iPods to get pumped up before the game. I didn’t just want this be some sort of cheesy tune. I wanted the blood to get moving. I also wanted it to be lasting.”

When J. Period, a D.J. who also serves as the Nets’ music supervisor, first heard the song, he immediately had a vision for it as an arena anthem and set about remixing it to maximize its impact, adding drums and speeding it up but leaving the song essentially intact, including that chant.

“Honestly, I think similar to everyone else, my reaction was that the Brooklyn chant is awesome,” he said. “It became about enhancing that chant and building everything around it to energize the crowd.”

Fans were chanting “Brook-lyn” at games during the preseason, before the song made its debut, but now do it in Forté’s cadence, helped along by J. Period, who uses part of the song’s chant during crucial moments of games to get the crowd fired up. He said playing the segment once or twice is usually enough to get the entire arena chanting along, although with the Knicks in Brooklyn on Tuesday, some fans will no doubt stay busy singing the praises of Carmelo Anthony.

Forté is 37, and his life has had its moments of real success and profound setbacks. His journey initially took him from Brownsville to the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire by way of a violin scholarship. After graduation he moved back to New York City, rooming with the rapper Talib Kweli before getting a break as a writer and producer with the Fugees. That, in turn, led to a Grammy nomination for his work on the album “The Score.”

But from there, he fell nearly as far as one could, finding himself charged in 2000 with being a participant in a cocaine-smuggling operation. Ultimately, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

At that point, the network of friends he had built over his years in the world of music rallied behind him, and he became, perhaps, the only known link between Carly Simon, Wyclef Jean and Orrin Hatch, the long-serving Republican senator from Utah.

Video

“Brooklyn: Something to Lean On”

A portion of John Forté’s song, “Brooklyn: Something to Lean On,” is played before every game as part of the Nets’ elaborate player introductions.

Simon, who knew Forté through her son, thought that Forté had received an unfair trial and that the mandatory minimum sentence was too extreme for a first offense. Her advocacy led to help from Hatch, and in 2008 President George W. Bush commuted Forté’s sentence.

Since he was released, Forté has rebuilt his music career, has worked with children to discourage drug use, and has been working on documentary projects with his company, Le Castle.

And he has now weighed in musically on the borough where his life first took shape. “Brooklyn is about tenacity,” he said. “It’s about diversity. It’s as grimy as it is intellectual and sophisticated. You never know what you’re going to get, but the one thing I’ve always experienced in Brooklyn is a strong sense of community.”

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Some had assumed that the Nets’ anthem would be supplied by Jay-Z, who, after all, owns a small share of the team; he officially opened Barclays Center with a weeklong series of concerts, and even had a hand in the design of the team’s uniforms. But J. Period, who picks all of the music played at the games, thinks a restrained, judicious use of Jay-Z’s image and music will serve the team well, especially since Brooklyn has so many other distinguished artists to choose from.

“As larger than life as Jay-Z is, Brooklyn is bigger than all of us,” he said. “I think that’s what this arena is all about.”

Pope, meanwhile, said the team, which has the song on its Web site, has received requests to release it more widely and that it will explore that option.

Still, the question remains: does the song have real staying power? As corny as “Meet the Mets” now sounds, it has endured for decades as something that makes Mets fans of any age sort of smile. Forté and J. Period both expressed a hope that this song would more or less last forever, too. For the moment, 19 games into a new season, they are happy with the initial feedback. Now all they need is for those “Broooo-klyn!” chants to serve as a victory soundtrack on Tuesday night.

A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2012, on Page B10 of the New York edition with the headline: Creating an Anthem for a Borough. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe